Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication apparatus having an auto-complete function, a method of controlling the same, and a storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
There are three approaches for specifying a destination address in a transmission of a mail, or the like, in conventional communications apparatuses. The first is an approach of selecting from destination addresses registered in an address book of the apparatus, and the second is an approach of inputting a destination address directly using a keyboard of an operation unit, or the like. Furthermore, the third approach is an approach (hereinafter referred to as an auto-complete) of combining a selection from registered destination address data and a selection of direct input by presenting destination address information of complementation candidates based on an input character sequence to a user when a destination address is directly input (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2011-71660).
However, an approach of obtaining a destination address from an external device via a network using Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (hereinafter referred to as LDAP) as a way of obtaining the destination address is not mentioned in the prior art. There are cases in which a referral object, that introduces another server and is specific to the LDAP protocol, is processed in an approach of obtaining a destination address using the LDAP protocol. A referral object is an object that introduces a different LDAP server. When a client connected to the LDAP server receives a referral object from the LDAP server, it is necessary to connect to the LDAP server introduced by the referral object in order to further obtain a destination address. For this reason, there are cases where connections to a plurality of LDAP servers are needed for a single destination address search, so in order to obtain a destination address by connecting the plurality of LDAP servers, a large amount of time is required to complete the obtaining of the destination address and to complete the auto-complete. For this reason there is a problem in that convenience is reduced. In particular, this problem is noticeable in a case where settings are such that an LDAP server is connected to using the SSL protocol.
Also, while an approach of maintaining a connection to the server once connected to an LDAP server in order to shorten the time period required for the auto-complete to finish has been proposed, there is the possibility that a plurality of servers will be connected to due to a referral object being processed. Because there are restrictions to the number of LDAP servers to which a communication apparatus is able to connect to at a time, it is difficult to maintain all of the connections to the connected LDAP servers, and so the above described problem is not resolved.